In the medical field, different medical procedures and examinations require varying levels of expertise. Some examinations and/or procedures can be conducted by a nurse practitioner, while others are typically done by a doctor (in human medicine) or a veterinarian (in the case of animal medicine), while still others require the participation of a highly trained medical specialist. One very specialized medical field is radiology. Radiology is a medical specialty that employs the use of imaging to diagnose and/or treat disease or trauma within the body. Radiologists use an array of imaging technologies including ultrasound, angiography, X-ray radiography, computed tomography (CT), nuclear medicine, positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to diagnose and/or treat ailments.
In human medicine, the medical practitioner or technician who conducts certain types of medical tests often lacks the expertise to properly interpret the results. As a result, a specialist is contacted to provide a diagnosis based on the results of the examination. For example, the acquisition of medical images is usually carried out by a radiographer or a radiological technician in a radiology lab without a radiologist or the ordering physician being present. Due to the complexity of radiological images, even the surgeons and primary care physicians who order the radiological examination typically cannot independently make a diagnosis based on the radiological images. Rather, a certified radiologist must interpret or “read” the images and produce a report of their analysis, diagnosis, findings and/or impressions. Since the radiologist is most often not present during the radiology session, the images must be sent to the radiologist for analysis after the session has been completed. Once the radiologist has completed their analysis, a report is typically transmitted to the ordering physician—who schedules an appointment at a later date to meet with the patient to discuss the results. If the radiologist sees something that requires further imaging (e.g., to get a different view of a region of interest) a new scan is ordered and the process is repeated. This substantially increases the time and costs involved in conducting the required level of analysis for appropriate diagnosis and healthcare delivery (pre-procedure, post-procedure and timely monitoring).
The process can be sped-up if the radiologist personally conducts the radiological examination or is present during such examination. However, there are a limited number of radiologists and it is often not practical from either a cost or availability standpoint for the radiologist to be physically present during the radiological examination. Therefore, the most common process is to acquire the radiological images in a first session and then transmit the images to the radiologist for review after the radiology session is complete. This problem is amplified in the veterinarian medicine field where there are only a few hundred radiologists that collectively service the needs of tens of thousands of veterinary clinics.
More generally, the need to obtain the assistance of a specialist can introduce substantial delay in the diagnosis of a variety of different types of medical conditions. In some fields of medicine and in some parts of the country, there are a very limited number of specialists available. As a result, in can take weeks to get appointments with the appropriate specialist(s) and arrange for the required lab work (e.g., ultrasound, MRI, CT, PET, EKG, etc.). It is not uncommon for a specialist reviewing test results to request another test or scan. This may be because the test was improperly performed. Alternatively, the results may indicate to the specialist that the test should be performed in a somewhat different manner or that further tests may be appropriate. As a result, both the diagnostic exam/test and the consultation with the specialist must be rescheduled.
Telemedicine has the potential to substantially improve patient care by facilitating more immediate access to highly trained specialists at a variety of stages in the health care delivery process. Accordingly systems that can improve the efficacy of remote medicine are of great interest.
The Applicant has developed a collaborative telemedicine platform that allows a remote medical specialist (such as a radiologist) to participate in an examination in real time. Several unique aspects of that platform are described herein. Although radiological applications are often used as a representative use of the technology, it should be apparent from the following description that the described collaborative telemedicine platform can also be used in a wide variety of other remote patient care and clinical patient care applications.